Sunday, August 2, 2009

Are You My Petri Dish?

I am thinking of conducting an experiment. I would like to rerun the scenario that I ran for yesterday's 4E game but using B/X. Is there five hearty souls out there that are willing to subject themselves to my gruesome experiment? It would be using skype and Gametable again and I would like to run it some evening this week. If you are interested please email me at p_armstrong [ at ] email [ dot ] com. It will likely only take a couple of hours. Here is the background I gave the 4E players (note: that it is taken from one of Paizo's Pathfinder Society organized play scenarios)

You are in a pub known as “The Tails”; a dingy, brine-soaked shack covered with swordfish tails located in a rundown section of town called South Reach. There, bitter longshoreman coming off the graveyard shifts pile in and slam rounds of a potent shark-fin liquor, cursing and complaining until they’re drunk enough to be carted home by noon. The disparaged scene has few prying eyes—the ideal place to pass along covert whispers.

The cloaked man across from you leans across the table and whispers with a rasped voice, “I’ve word that the accursed pirate Darsielle Du Moire has anchored his much sought ship, the Hydra’s Fang, in the harbor. Everyone’s looking for that vermin. He carries with him some ancient tablets of extreme historical value. Unknown to most, Wittlestone, the small town Du Moire razed to the ground, was also home to Myraxus Threeshadows, a noted but aging sage and mystic. Among Myraxus’s possessions he kept ancient forgeries of several tablets used in ancient arcane rites. When Darsielle destroyed the village, he slew the mystic and took the tablets, hoping to pawn them to one of his buyers here in Portown. The tablets are a priceless archeological treasure, one I greatly desire. In fact, just prior to Myraxus's death, I placed several bids to purchase the tablets and so naturally I was one of the first to realize they’d gone missing. You must race to get Du Moire and recover the stolen tablets before his pursuers find him or he flees port."

“If my sources are correct, I’ve learned that he owes a substantial amount of money to one of the Consortium’s more ambitious Enforcers, an importer named Lubor Staizkal. Likely he needs to settle with him at some point. Go to Lubor’s shop on Meldon Lane, near the docks, and see if you can pick up Du Moire’s trail from there, then do whatever you can to get those tablets. If you bring them to me you will be handsomely rewarded.”